HISD contends with surge in immigrant children
Elida Tuj is so overwhelmed most days that it’s difficult to concentrate at school. Often she puts her head on her desk or her eyes well up with tears.
The teen has a month to find an attorney to represent her at Houston’s downtown immigration court.
If not, she’ll likely be deported back to the remote Mayan community in southwestern Guatemala from where she trekked for weeks through Mexico last fall. But there simply isn’t the money.
She owes her mother in Mazatenango thousands of dollars for paying a smuggler to bring her here.
And she’s racked up two expensive truancy tickets at Lee High School, where she struggles with English, her third language after her native Quiché.
“Sometimes things just aren’t going well,” said Elida, whose tiny frame, long dark hair and deep dimples belie her 17 years. “Teachers don’t understand.”
She’s one of more than 4,600 unaccompanied Central American children the Office of Refugee Resettlement has sent to stay with relatives in Harris County since October 2013.
The flood of more than 68,000 children coming here alone peaked last summer, overwhelming the federal government and roiling the American public, though attention waned after a U.S.-led multilateral effort caused their arrivals to plummet by the fall.
This month most of these children will, like Elida, finish their first year in U.S. schools while they
await their possible deportation later this year.
More than half of the unaccompanied minors were placed in just five states — with Texas and Houston home to the greatest share in the nation — posing complicated challenges for the handful of school districts most heavily impacted.
Enrollment jumps
New figures this month from the Houston Independent School District illustrate the dilemma facing educators: The number of its students within their first year of instruction at U.S. schools and born in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — the principal drivers of last year’s crisis — jumped nearly 200 percent from 2014 to more than 2,000 this year.
As the nation’s seventhlargest school system, the district educates more than 215,200 students and about a third of them are English language learners.
Nonetheless the recent influx was formidable because it was so unexpected, large and heavily focused in just a few geographic areas.
Forty percent of the Central American newcomers in Houston this year enrolled at just 10 schools, all save two on the southwest side.
“This is an issue that’s only affecting maybe 10 to 15 school districts in the country but where it’s affecting them, it’s really affecting them,” said Margie McHugh, director for the national center on immigrant integration policy at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington D.C. think tank. “It’s a pretty concentrated phenomenon based on where earlier waves of unauthorized Central Americans settled and that’s one of the reasons it’s not getting the attention it deserves.”
Large waves of immigrant children coming to the U.S. are not unprecedented. Operation Peter Pan, until now one of the biggest mass exoduses of unaccompanied minors from a single country, airlifted about 14,000 children from Cuba in the early 1960s. Youth have been coming here alone from Vietnam, Haiti and even Central America for decades.
Congress used to fund school districts more robustly for teaching immigrant and refugee children, McHugh said, but that was reduced under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Legislation approved last year would give Texas and 34 other states $14 million in federal aid to help these students but McHugh said that’s still a drop in the bucket.
In response to the surge of students, HISD next school year will open seven “newcomer hubs” at campuses which have witnessed the largest increases, including at Lee High School in the Hillcroft area. Nearly one in 10 students there this year were enrolled in U.S. schools for the first time and from El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras. The idea is to concentrate resources on schools with the experience and capacity to teach this specialized population rather than have them spread across the district. Lee, for instance, is expected to add six ESL teachers to the 13 the school currently employs to meet the anticipated influx next year from neighboring schools.
“These are kids with very special needs, not just academically, but emotionally. They’ve been through a lot of trauma,” said Gracie Guerrero, assistant superintendent for multilingual programs at HISD. “If a school gets just one child with all these needs, that’s a challenge in and of itself.”
Emotional trauma
At Lee, about half of the school’s pupils are learning English as a second language and its principal, Jonathan Trinh, who relocated to Houston as a Vietnamese refugee when he was 12; so he is passionate about the issue. But even in a school so used to handling these challenges, the impact of the Central American influx was deeply felt.
“Previously we had mainly refugees or migrant families who came together, and there was a plan for them to stay,” said Garrett Reed, who has taught ESL at Lee for 20 years. “These new kids, they just hopped on a train and came here, their families are split up, there’s a lot of emotional trauma.”
Many of the kids suffered extreme violence in their home countries or on horrific journeys here. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has estimated that nearly 60 percent could qualify for asylum under international laws.
At Lee, Reed said about one quarter of his Central American newcomers this year arrived without being able to read or write. He spent the first months of the school year teaching them their ABCs. At school, gang fights have increased and in class, children often tell him about being badly assaulted on their journey or in immigrant detention facilities. Many found themselves living suddenly with relatives they didn’t know and are themselves barely making it.
Others have to pay back their smugglers. When administrators inquired why one student was missing so much school, he told them he works past midnight most days. His parents in Guatemala put up their house as collateral for the coyotes who brought him here, and he must send them the money or risk losing their home.
“I feel like most days I’m just keeping an emotional lid on half the class,” Reed said.
The range of education varies widely. For some, Spanish is a second language after their indigenous mother tongue. Others, like 15-year-old Jorge Mendoza, dropped out of school when he was 9 in Honduras to help his mother support their family. His dad died when he was young.
Last year, he came to Houston to live with an aunt he’d never met before, “looking for a better future.”
The teen works every weekend and school vacation painting houses and saved enough money to recently buy a small plot of land on Honduras’ Atlantic coast.
Now he’s saving to build a house. He’ll probably go back in the summer, he said. He doesn’t enjoy school and has barely learned any English. But mostly he misses his mom and four siblings.
“People told me America was cool,” he said. “But now I don’t think it’s that cool anymore. I want to go home.”
For all those students who drop out and struggle, teachers say those with strong family ties and more stable home lives seem to succeed.
They point to kids like Maykol Garcia, whose mother sent for him last year because the 14-yearold was living alone with his two sisters in San Pedro Sula, the most dangerous city in Honduras.
Their mother, Patricia Salazar, left them eight years ago because she couldn’t support them on the $30 a month she earned at a factory. Their father has never been in their lives.
They stayed with their grandparents, but there was no high school or university in their village so two years ago they had to relocate alone to the nearest city. In Houston, Salazar worried about their safety. She missed them.
During their journey here she checked in constantly with the coyote she’d paid to bring them. After they crossed the Rio Grande, they were caught by Border Patrol agents, who released them to Salazar in July.
Their court dates are this summer, and the family has paid an immigration lawyer $5,000 to fight their deportation.
A straight-A student
Salazar made painstaking arrangements to ease their transition here, quitting her factory job to work two jobs as a cleaner and a waitress so she can come home in the middle of the day and cook them lunch.
She pays $1,000 a month for an apartment in a gated complex with a security guard so the children will be safe when she works until midnight. She calls them often from work to ensure they’re doing their homework and practicing their English.
So far, her effort is paying off. Maykol is making all A’s and his teachers at Lee say he’s gone from speaking no English at all to mastering an intermediate level in just a year.
“I try to focus in class and when I’m not sure about something I ask,” Maykol said.
He wants to go to a university and do something related to computers. His favorite band is Maroon Five.
For Salazar, his success makes all her sacrifices worth it. “I tell them all the time, ‘Good things take effort,’ ” the 37-year-old said. “I’m very strict with them. I want them to be well prepared for their future.”